


C is for Countdown, Causality, and Close Enough

by ivorygates



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Episode: s01e15 Singularity, Episode: s02e21 1969, Future Fic, Gen, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-02
Updated: 2015-03-02
Packaged: 2018-03-15 23:40:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3466361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygates/pseuds/ivorygates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cassandra Fraiser's life, from 1985-1969.  End of Season 7, more or less.</p><p>Written for the March, 2015, Time Travel Alphabet Soup</p>
            </blockquote>





	C is for Countdown, Causality, and Close Enough

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [](http://wyomingnot.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**wyomingnot**](http://wyomingnot.dreamwidth.org/) for the lightning beta. Sekrit note to [](http://fignewton.dreamwidth.org/profile)[](http://fignewton.dreamwidth.org/)**fignewton** : I used all of them but "cryostasis".
> 
> WARNINGS FOR DISCUSSION OF SUICIDE, MENTION OF GENOCIDE

Cassie was eighteen the first time Aunt Sam told her the future. It was her birthday: not her real birthday, because Hanka-times and Earth-times didn't match up, but Aunt Sam had given her an "official" birthday of November 4th (because both Janet-mom and Aunt Sam had said, when she first came, that it wouldn't be "fair" for her birthday to be on Halloween).

On November 4th, 2003, Janet-mom has been dead for almost a year.

Nirrti has been dead for two. Cassie has always marked time by the deaths it contains. She'd been 12 when the world ended, twelve-plus-five days when more _Tau'ri_ came (the others, the first ones, were dead).

Uncle Daniel, she thinks, is the only one who really understands what it was like to live on Hanka those last years. The aliens (the _Tau'ri_ ) had been surprised to know the Hankans knew all about the eclipse that was coming, but they always had. The Great Goddess had told them, centuries ago: _"With the darkness will come the apocalypse."_ All the time the _Tau'ri_ were building their observatory, the last of the Hankans were preparing for the end.

There were a lot of children born in the countdown to the Last Days, for the Great Goddess (False Goddess: not a goddess, not even human, an evil lying parasite) had promised them that if the True Child came to be, the apocalypse would be averted. Cassie was the last child ever born on Hanka, born too late to be their salvation: you had to be sixteen to go into the forest. To be tested.

With every son or daughter who went to the forest, the Hankans hoped the True Child would be revealed. But everyone who went to the forest returned, and so the Hankans knew there would be no reprieve. Cassie had felt so proud to be treated as the adult she knew she would never live to become on the day Mama brought home the Final Cup from the temple, saying that they would all drink together on the Day of Darkness. (Many had not waited, once hope was gone. Each month, each year, more of the village houses had stood empty.) Cassie and her family had worked for days preparing their Feast of Leavetaking.

For nothing.

Five days before the Last Day, plague struck. Cassie had run to the new observatory. She doesn't remember why now. To beg for help? To beg the _Tau'ri_ to leave? Surely they had angered the Great Goddess by their presence (both true and not-true, she learned a long time later: Nirrti had been afraid, and angered by her own fear, not by them). Perhaps, if they left...

But they were dead when she reached them. Everyone was dead, everywhere.

Everyone but her.

The chronology of her life is something Cassie has pieced together over the years, assembling it carefully from the fractured pieces of a child's memories. This the day the last of the candidates returns from the forest in failure, that the day the leavetakings begin. On this day the plague, on that day the eclipse. Here her return to the planet filled with her unburied dead, there the death of the one who wiped them out as casually as Cassie might wash a dirty dish. Her life on Earth had been a strange intermission in which nobody dies: she was almost relieved when Uncle Daniel did. (He came back after a year, and she never let anybody know how much that worried her.)

Then Janet-mom's death, and Uncle Jack is gone too. Aunt Sam says he isn't dead, but Cassie thinks she's lying: he'd be here if he weren't dead. She lives with Aunt Sam now, and Cassie knows that Aunt Sam is both relieved and worried that she doesn't mourn Janet-mom, but Cassie's entire life has been a series of deaths. Death is normal, and Cassie, already cursed to survive, thinks she must be cursed to be death's witness until the end of her days.

And now it's November, another birthday, one Cassie doesn't want, because it means she's _still here._ Since Janet-mom died, Cassie has thought (almost daily) about joining her. The deaths will go on, she knows, whether she's alive or not. But she's tired of watching. (Uncle Jack, she thinks, would know what she's thinking, but he wouldn't know the words to talk about it without making it real. And he's dead, anyway.) Uncle Daniel talks about what Janet-mom would want, but if he understands Cassie's Hankan childhood, he doesn't understand the one thing Cassie clings to like a lifeline: the dead don't want anything at all.

Cassie's decided her birthday is a good day to die on (in her beginning is her end). She can't go back to the forest on Hanka, but there are woods here, and she has her driver's license. She's told Aunt Sam that some of her friends are throwing a party for her tonight. She'll do it then.

But that afternoon Aunt Sam sits her down (a brown velvet box in her hands) and says: "There's something I've needed to tell you for a long time, Cassie. You're old enough now."

Cassie sits obediently, her face smooth, her attitude compliant. In her own mind she's already dead, and the dead are endlessly patient.

And Aunt Sam tells her a story.

"The year after you came here to Earth to live, we, SG-1, went on a mission. But something went wrong with the Stargate, and we ended up in the past. In 1969. I figured out a way for us to get home, but we had to use it too early. We overshot and ended up somewhere in the future. And you sent us home."

It takes a moment for the words to penetrate. "Me? _Where_ in the future?"

"We never knew," Aunt Sam says. "But you were an old woman there. You looked happy," she adds awkwardly.

Cassie feels a faint sense of betrayal, as if Aunt Sam is trying to steal something from her. Is this a lie, some way of convincing her that her future is full of promise? (Her guidance counselor says that all the time, even though Cassie's grades have slipped drastically this year.) If it's true, what does it _matter?_ (Old? How old? How long does Aunt Sam expect her to go on living? Can't someone else save them? Why her?)

"Are you sure it was me?" she finally asks.

Aunt Sam smiles. "Very sure. The Colonel didn't recognize you, but I did. You told us our journey was just beginning."

"Uncle Jack was there?" Despite herself, Cassie feels a flare of hope, before she remembers that the Uncle Jack her future-self would have (will have?) met is from five years ago. It doesn't mean he's coming back now.

"We all were," Aunt Sam says. "You told me I explained everything to you when you were old enough to understand."

"And now you are." Cassie's voice is flat. She isn't sure what to feel. Happiness seems like a betrayal; misery seems an inappropriate response to hearing she's going to save the world.

"And now I am," Aunt Sam agrees. "I know this isn't really a happy birthday, but...I got you a present." She holds out the small unwrapped box.

Cassie opens it. It's an oval pendant, almost as long as her thumb. On one side is a clock face--not a real timepiece, just a representation of one--a cameo set in silver. She turns the pendant over. On the back, two dates and times are engraved: August 10th, 1969--9:15 A.M. August 11th, 1969--6:03 P.M.

"We met General Hammond in the past," Aunt Sam says. "Before we left on our mission, General Hammond--here--gave me a note that had the dates and times of the solar flares we could use to get back. He knew what to write because he'd read it back in 1969."

Cassie thinks about it for a moment. "That's a paradox," she objects.

"I know," Aunt Sam says. "That's time-travel for you."

"I guess it is," Cassie says. She closes her fingers over the pendant.

Her future.

Maybe she needs to have one after all.

#

Cassie's still in college when Disclosure comes in 2010. The broad strokes of the Stargate Program's history are made public, but it's another ten years before she joins the United Nations Colonization, Liaison, and Exploration program (the IOA being a thing of the past). Her research lab is in Washington, one of the many facilities that support UNCLE's Moonbase.

She's never forgotten her promise (implicit promise, made by a future self). Over the years, her aunt and uncles have told her every detail of the few minutes they spent in a future she has yet to reach. She wonders how that truth that is (so far) only a story can be achieved: there's a mockup of the Gate Room at the Smithsonian, but everything there is nonfunctioning replicas. The original Cheyenne facility is mothballed: the dialing computer is still there, but there's no Stargate.

But there's time. The Praxyon time machine was discovered in 2012: they removed the Stargate there, so it can't function, but the computer and its network of satellites are still in place, and they've been studying them. Cassie has the date and time of the solar flare that sent SG-1 home (and the date and time--down to a tenth of a second--that they walked back through the Stargate into Cheyenne Mountain, so she has one solid point of reference), but Aunt Sam told her they entered the Stargate too early, back in the past. She says it was "a few seconds early", but none of them know exactly.

Summoning the future isn't the whole of Cassie's life, of course. There is love and adventure, marriage and family, a rewarding career, and a succession of loving rambunctious dogs. She's happy. The future is a place, and she has a long way to go before she reaches it.

In 2060 all the work with the Praxyon device pays off. They finally get their own form of (non-solar-flare-dependent) time-travel working, and Cassie runs simulations for every entry and exit point in a sixty-second window around the solar flare that SG-1 used so long ago. Now she has a range of possible arrival dates, but she doesn't know which one it's going to be. Fortunately she isn't the only one who cares about getting the right answer. It isn't that General O'Neill was a hero (he was) or that Dr. Jackson discovered Atlantis (he did) or that Master Teal'c was instrumental in the liberation of the Jaffa (he was) or that General Samantha Carter did groundbreaking research in quantum physics (she did). It's that if the four of them don't come home from 1969, those things won't happen. (Won't _have_ happened, and only Sam could have unraveled the whichness of causality that allows for the fixed past not to have happened yet.)

All her _Tau'ri_ family are dead now. Sam was the last. Eighty years ago Captain Samantha Carter began her career researching the possibility of using the Gate for time-travel. She lived to see her theoretical research proven right (even if by one of the _Goa'uld_ ) but not to see it reach its fullest flowering. After death, her work as well as her name lived on: the Samantha Carter Research Institute is world-famous, and all of its staff understands the dangers of violating causality. Even though it works, the Praxyon Device and its offspring are labeled "experimental", and will probably remain "experimental" long after Cassie is dead. The present (past, future) is precarious enough without getting its elbow jogged. Sam devoted her life to making sure everyone understood that: no matter how tempting it is to roll the dice to make things come out more neatly, the risks are too great.

But there's one adventure in time-travel that still needs to happen for the past to come out right, and they need to be sure it will work before the day it's required. Early in 2061, Cassie makes her first trip to the future.

The Institute has installed a functional Gate inside its facility (Cheyenne Mountain has long since become the home of SCRI: everything above Level 28's been modernized and remodeled, but the Gate Room itself has been left untouched) so Cassie will have a Terran destination as her arrival point (Earth will have air and gravity no matter what happens, something you really can't say about the Moon). She picks 2100 as her first target: it's at the far outside of her calculations as to SG-1's probable arrival date, so it's a good place to start. She has to ricochet between a dozen Gates to get there. When she steps out on Earth at last, the familiar chamber is dark and shrouded.

There are four skeletons huddled together in front of one of the access doors. The gaudy archaic clothing that covers them is stained and dusty. _Too late,_ she thinks in startled grief.

But it doesn't matter. In a way it hasn't happened, because it never will. (She promises herself that, over and over, and tries not to think of Hanka.)

It's 2070, and she can activate the Stargate with a device small enough to wear on her wrist. She's gone on dozens of journeys into a future that gets closer every day, a rendezvous she dares not be late for (the last--and only--appointment she has to keep won't require a time machine, only an accurate chronometer). By the late Seventies, she's eliminated every possible date but one.

It's August 11, 2082. She stands in the corridor outside the Gate Room, wondering why she's so nervous. She knows how this comes out, after all. There's a digital countdown ticking across the bottom of the display on the wall in front of her. It shows her the image of the room beyond the door, a shadowy thing of shrouded machines and concealed futures. She touches the pendant around her neck for reassurance, the pendant Sam gave her all those years ago.

As she watches and waits, the chevrons of the Stargate begin to light. Cassie takes a deep breath and forces herself to smile. This is the last time she will see them alive, and for everyone's sake they can never even suspect what she knows.

The Event Horizon establishes, stabilizes. Her beloved dead come tumbling through. "Where is everyone?" she hears Sam say (they think--they thought--they would be returning to their own time, not knowing, as they learned much later, how unforgiving the chronometry of time-travel is).

Cassie steps through the door to greet them.

They all look so young. Daniel's hair is an unkempt mop. Sam is younger than most of her granddaughters. Cassie walks toward them, unable to keep from staring hungrily at their faces, saving up this one last _now_ of them that must last her the rest of her life.

"Hello, Jack," she says. "Teal'c. Daniel; I hardly recognized you with hair."

"Do we know you?" Jack asks. The suspicion in his voice is so familiar it makes her smile.

"Sam will recognize me," she says. The words she is to speak were written long ago. They're as fixed and unchanging as a play.

Once upon a time she thought of Death as her personal ringmaster, staging a Carnival of the Dead just for her. It's been a very long time since she's had anything in common with the angry child who believed that: in the end, her life has been spent in the service of life, not as a witness to death.

Cassie embraces the woman who is yet to give her the pendant Cassie has worn since her eighteenth birthday. She could hand it to her now, start another endless Ouroboros spiral of eternally-causeless effects, but she won't. Let the past become (at last) fixed and set into hopeful immutability.

Her young friends want to ask questions she doesn't dare answer. She'd give anything to keep them with her just a few minutes more, but she can't. She doesn't dare risk the mutable past, risk the lives of all the people who've lived long lives because SG-1 went from _here_ to _there_ at the hour appointed. And so she smiles (forcing herself to hide what she feels), and lifts her hand. The Stargate activates once more.

"I will tell you this," she says. "Your journey's just beginning."

_In my end is my beginning._

###

**Author's Note:**

> Figuring out Season Seven chronology is a complete goat-rodeo. I've done my best. But "Resurrection" and "Inauguration" both need to take place in the January following the November in which Henry Hayes is elected, since he is already in office, and the season ending two parter, "Lost City", must clearly cover an extensive period of time as well, going purely on internal references, and it has to be after January. (Of what year? Who knows!?!?! Idiot Canadian wannabe writers don't need to do any research!) Earlier in the same broadcast year we have the two-parter "Heroes" which has a February air date, which is what I often go by when deciding when events fall in canon, but in this case it would leave the next ten months pretty much canon-event free, so I've done a lot of handwaving.
> 
> Canonically, Cassie Frasier has a birth year of 1985 (Jack mentions that she's thirteen in the episode "1969", which takes place in 1998), and "Singularity", the episode in which she is introduced, has a 10/31/97 airdate. In the transcript of Singularity, two facts are established: everyone on Hanka is dead, and that the death-toll is around 1000. Since that number is far too low to sustain a viable population, and because the Hankans connect the solar eclipse with a prophesied apocalypse, that gave me the idea for the background of racial suicide I use here (it's a concept TPTB seem to be really fond of. See: "Unending".)
> 
> While the age of Cassie's future self is never given, I chose 2082 on the theory that medicine's continuing advance will both extend human lifespan and retard the visible effects of human aging: the actress playing future-Cassie (Pamela Perry) was born in 1953 so she would have been around 45 when the episode was filmed, so her age cannot be used to establish the age of future-Cassie, as the actress was almost certainly in aging makeup.
> 
> There is no explanation or justification for the "Miss Haversham Regrets" outfit future-Cassie is wearing, though. It makes her look like Wendy Darling on meth.
> 
> #


End file.
